Be careful when opening Pandora’s Box of SAP API Changes!

Your systems are getting more and more integrated

It’s nothing out of the ordinary to see an SAP S/4HANA Landscape with thousands of connections/interfaces. And your most important business processes, such as Order-To-Cash are running through multiple integrated systems.

During one of the episodes of the Navigating SAP API Testing show, we spoke about the importance of testing after minor changes – watch the full video below:

SAP Integrations lets you customize your systems to your needs and allows you to use the software and resources that make your operations more efficient. The flexibility is much better, but the complexity is rising with it. As they say – with great power comes great responsibility. In this case it’s this…

The APIs are interdependent

Let’s take a look at an example order-to-cash process.

As you can see, the information from the original Purchase Order goes through multiple systems via APIs, which makes executing this process infinitely easier than it would have been without the integration.

But this also means that one, seemingly small change in this entire infrastructure can change the whole landscape.

In today’s world you have less control over deployment schedule

Back in the days of the traditional on-premise world you had way more control over the deployment schedule and testing. You would deploy changes based on your preferred schedule – for example once per month or once per quarter. This gave you a possibility to plan testing these changes in advance to make sure that this deployment was not generating any risk.

In the cloud world, things have changed. Your software vendors are working on their own schedules. And because you are using multiple software components to run your business processes, the changes might be made on a daily basis. Because some of the components of your environment might be updated every single day.

Of course, the software is tested heavily by vendors. But it’s tested in isolation and not in the configuration that is running at your organization, where it’s integrated (via APIs) with other software components. And it’s your responsibility to make sure that those changes are not affecting your APIs and business processes to ensure business continuity.

Small changes in SAP APIs can be bigger than you think

During one of the episodes of the Navigating SAP API Testing show, Michał Kowalczewski, the CTO and CO-Founder of Int4 said that making changes in SAP APIs can be like drilling a hole on the wing of an airplane.

Drilling a hole itself can take 5 minutes. But if you don’t want to cause an airplane catastrophe, you first need to study the physics, the wiring and the impact of drilling this hole. 

The same can be said about SAP APIs – changing two lines of code can take 2 minutes. But this change can have a major impact on the rest of the end to end process flow. Simply take a look at the following comment from one of our latest LinkedIn posts.

“Nightmare” is a very fitting description. And this is exactly what you can call…

The Pandora’s Box of SAP API changes

To summarize, especially if your enterprise is centralizing ERP systems, the SAP APIs are usually heavily interdependent. And with hundreds of connected systems and thousands of interfaces that are changing on your software vendors’ schedules, even a “2 lines of code” change can critically affect your business processes… And cause the Pandora’s Box of SAP API changes to be opened.

(Thank you Alisdair Bach for the naming inspiration)

Due to the level of complexity that enterprise companies may face in their SAP environment, it may not even be possible to fully investigate the impact that the smallest change can have on other systems. The side effects that the minor change might cause are hard to foresee.

With those challenges – your ways of working may need redefining. 

How can you make sure that your small change does not generate big troubles?

Most companies want to mitigate this risk with the use of automated E2E testing on the UI layer of all the systems that are formulating a business process. But this approach is costly and the granularity might not be enough – since a business process can have hundreds or thousands of variances of those processes. And with standard automated E2E testing, you’d need to multiply them in order to ensure full business process testing, which due to the scale of this approach, might simply not be possible.

In short – if your business process has 100 variants, and you can only test 5 of them with automated E2E testing, then there’s a big risk that the change you just implemented affected one of the 95 variants that you didn’t test.

The solution – SAP API Testing and service virtualization 

In this case, if you want to make sure that your APIs are working in the correct way, SAP API Testing is much faster and simpler – both in creation and execution. And with them you can increase the number of variants that you’ll cover.

The integration in enterprise companies is based on Integration Platforms. And those platforms are storing the historical data that was exchanged. With Int4 Suite you can grab the historical data that contains every variant of your business process and automatically create test cases based on them.

Instead of manually recording each step from the screen level on at least a few different systems, you can test dramatically faster.

Want to see how you can save your existing messages as Test Cases? Here’s the video explaining that capability:

How to introduce SAP API Testing to your organization?

In order to adapt to these new SAP testing challenges, you need to evaluate your testing toolkit. 

Int4 Suite is a platform that allows you to simulate your EDI/B2B connections with Service Virtualization capabilities and then quickly retest thousands of interfaces and business scenarios.

If you want to learn more about why Service Virtualization and API Testing are two hidden gems of SAP testing, below you can find a crash course explaining how Enterprise Customers such as Puma or Bacardi are using Int4 Suite:

Book a discovery session today!

If you want to see the Int4 Suite and discuss how your organization could use it to increase quality and decrease risk, simply click the button below and schedule a discovery session.